THE Stereophonics are ready to follow their Welsh countrymen Sir Tom Jones and Dame Shirley Bassey and record the Bond theme tune.

The group, led by Kelly Jones, have a foot in the door after working with Bond composer David Arnold – who has scored five of the last six 007 films and co-written the theme tunes to Casino Royale (You Know My Name by Chris Cornell) and The World is Not Enough (by Garbage).

Arnold arranged the strings on the Stereophonics’ eighth album Graffiti On The Train and Kelly said: “If we are called to do the Bond tune I’ll be there. I think it would be good.

“When we worked with David on the album, the members of the 36-piece orchestra had worked on the soundtrack for every Bond film since Doctor No.

“It was an incredible experience.”

Writing the new Bond tune is certainly within the band’s new ‘we can do anything’ ethos.

Kelly hopes in the next three years to have released two albums and a film.

The Stereophonics (Image: Handout)

Not bad for a band, who some were calling also-rans after their 2009 album Keep Calm and Carry On, only managed a number 11 placing and a paltry 160,000 sales.

Fans, as well as the band, were shocked, given that since second album Performance and Cocktails in 1999, any Stereophonics albums had gone to number one.

Kelly said: “I was disheartened. We thought we’d made a good album.

“We were playing the songs off the album and they were going down well. But it just didn’t work on a commercial front.”

Kelly puts the problem down to the X Factor and putting out Keep Calm too soon after their ‘best of’ album, Decade in the Sun, in 2008, which sold more than a million copies.

He said: “We delivered a new record very quickly. I thought the songs were great and Universal, who we’d signed to after spending almost all our career with V2, wanted to release it in November like Decade in the Sun.

“They thought they were going to have a repeat of the ‘best of’ album but we were a bit nervous about it having to compete with acts like Leona Lewis.”

Looking back to November 2009, at one point six of the top 10 were artists either discovered by The X Factor – including JLS and Alexandra Burke – or had appeared in the programme (Michael Bublé, Westlife, Black Eyed Peas) or, indeed were a judge on it – Cheryl Cole.

Leona’s album Echo went to the top and was succeeded by another Cowell protégée, Susan Boyle’s debut album, I Dreamed a Dream. No wonder Stereophonics’ Keep Calm, sunk. But it made Kelly realise that their cycle of album and tour had to stop.

He’d been on the road for three years and decided the next album had to be about them again, and not about making music for radio or television.

Eight albums into their 15-year career Kelly wanted one thing – not to make another Stereophonics-sounding album.

He said: “What am I going to write about now I’m 38? I can do that, but for me we needed to dig a bit deeper. We had to start afresh.

The band also quit Universal and found a new rehearsal room in west London to hang out and make music without any pressure.”

Kelly also branched out, writing two screenplays. One of them is based on his teenage years and the other he based Graffiti On The Train on. He’s currently on the third draft and is now in meetings with Bafta about funding. He describes it as a cross between Stand by Me and Quadrophenia.

Kelly, said: “I kept hearing these kids climbing over my roof and I didn’t know what was going on. I thought they were trying to get into the house. One night I caught them and shouted ‘What are you doing on my roof?’

“And they said, ‘oh we’re not trying to break in, we’re just trying to climb over your house to get to the train track to paint the trains’.”

“All this time I thought they were trying to break in, but they just wanted to graffiti these trains. Not that it’s any better!

“But that was the start of the idea.

“I came up with this scenario where a guy was writing messages on a train for his girl who catches the same train every morning and one day he proposes to her.

“But that’s the day he slips off the train, like the kids in the Sudan who surf the trains.

“That’s the beginning of the story and why these two kids end up fleeing to Europe. It’s a rites of passage story from that point on.”

As well as writing the screenplay and the album, Kelly has directed three videos for the tracks already released from the album – Violins and Trombones, In A Moment and current single Indian Summer, which is out on download and will be released on Monday as a 10-inch vinyl single.

The new Tom Petty-sounding single is all over the radio .

Kelly laughed: “I’m very relieved. It came on the album at the last minute.

“We had recorded about 25 songs and originally we were going to do a double album but decided against it to make the perfect 45-minute record.

“I thought Indian Summer would be on the second album, which we will release next year.

“But I played it to a bunch of people from the office and they said ‘what’s that song?’ I said: ‘It’s going to be on the next one’. And they were ‘nah it should be on this one’.

“I didn’t recognise its full potential.

“You record so many, you’re too close to it. It’s hard to know which ones will work and which ones won’t.”

As the main songwriter of the band that was formed in 1992 in Cwmaman, Cynon Valley, Wales, that’s no surprise.

Kelly, bassist Richard Jones and the late Stuart Cable on drums (“I miss him every day”) have gone from a small village to playing around the world, now with guitarist Adam Zindani and new drummer Jamie Morrison (who replaced previous drummer Javier Weyler, who left the band last year).

As well as five number one albums, they are a huge draw live and will play T in the Park this year. Whenever they are at the Balado festival they always attract a big crowd and Kelly can’t wait. “It’s always been an amazing experience.

“We are really excited to play songs like Indian Summer at T and get that buzz from playing in a big field.

“This is the second chapter of the Stereophonics.”

Stereophonics’ new album Graffiti On The Train is out on March 4. They play Edinburgh Usher Hall on March 27.